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Over the past 18 months we have witnessed a sharp rise in the popularity of wearable technology, particularly in fitness and activity trackers. Medical Director of the NHS, Sir Bruce Keogh, recently told The Guardian how such wearables could eventually revolutionise the healthcare industry. With the public fitness habit intensifying and the technology growing more...

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If you’ve got a smartphone and are looking to get fit, looking at the wearable devices on offer, then you might want to hold back on that purchase for now. A new research letter from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) argues smartphones apps are just as effective as wearable devices in tracking step counts.

JAMA’s paper, entitled ‘Accuracy of Smartphone Applications and Wearable...

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Meet HIRIS. HIRIS stands for Human Interactive Reliable Integrated System, and boldly claims to be the “first wearable computer for everyone.” It’s a big claim – but does it stack up?

The main reasoning behind this claim is because HIRIS can withstand any environment and be placed anywhere, from different body parts to on tennis rackets. This isn’t an entirely new idea; Misfit Wearables,

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Wearable tech and the quantified self clearly provides a huge opportunity for the hardware vendors and digital brands involved; giving them greater insight into the lives, behaviours and tastes of consumers than ever before. But as we learnt in Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility" - although a responsibility that I feel many organisations are not taking seriously enough.

Google is currently in the British high court accused of bypassing security settings...

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Our data science intern, Heng Li, obliged our begging and wrote a blog post about what he’s been working on for us this winter. Here is what he told us:

This winter I have the pleasure of working on a data science internship project for Strap along with Qiyao Wang. Simply speaking, the goal of our...

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Health insurance provider, AXA PPP, is hosting their first ever "Health Tech & You" awards at the Design Museum in London and will announce an overall winner during a ceremony on the 18th March 2015. Perhaps predictably, the shortlist is laden with wearable and connected devices which monitor health and performance to usher in a new-generation of patient-led...

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Stop kidding yourself. Simply wearing a fitness tracker for a couple of months was never going to make you reach your health goals. In order for your new gadget to have any meaningful impact on your health, you need to know how to use it as effectively as possible.

1. Establish a Baseline

You might be raring to try out your new toy, but if you want to track your fitness level accurately you’ll need to establish a...

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said it will only monitor wearable devices that claim to help diagnose and treat major illnesses.

The majority of devices on the market, however, will be classified in the ‘general wellness’ category, which as the name suggests relates more to general wellbeing and can be associated with weight management, physical fitness, improving self-esteem, sleep management or sexual function.

The FDA notes it’s more the classification...

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A report published by A&D Medical of more than 2000 US adults has found more than half (56%) of respondents want to monitor their health with connected health devices that automatically send information to their doctors.

The potential of wearable technology, connected devices all powered by the Internet of Things (IoT) is here to stay – and according to A&D, consumers are increasingly looking for buy-in. Blood pressure (37%) was the most popular test respondents wanted to...

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We’ve got some bad news for you. That Fitbit, or Jawbone you got for Christmas isn’t going to magically make you a healthier person, or even really influence you to become healthier, just because of the technology involved.

That’s the key takeaway from a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which argues that mobile health apps need to do better in utilising theories of health behaviour, rather than focus on the...